This invention relates to the field of using connected computers to securely initiate, modify, monitor, and report complex long-duration business transactions, specifically business transactions such as international shipping.
Managing complex transactions can be a complex, paper-based, error prone process. The complexity, amount of paper, propensity for error, and associated costs can increase with the complexity of the transaction. These characteristics are especially apparent in international shipping, where complexity, time delays, and regulatory requirements can lead to significant costs.
For example, each day several thousand commercial trucks cross the U.S.-Mexico border at six major ports of entry along the U.S./Mexico border. Many carry cargo to and from the maquilas in Mexico. A maquila, or xe2x80x9ctwin plant,xe2x80x9d typically provides inexpensive labor for the assembly of parts or subassemblies into finished goods that are then re-shipped to the U.S. for consumption. Passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has increased maquila traffic at ports of entry along the southwestern U.S. border significantly since 1993. Maquila border crossings are projected to be in the thousands daily by the year 2000. Ironically, the increased border traffic has provided drug smugglers with a crowded street in which to disappear, creating a tension among US government agencies responsible for the facilitation of trade and the interdiction of drugs. The governments of the United States and Mexico currently have projects under way or planned that will expand the physical capacity of existing ports of entry. The U.S. recently opened a new port at Santa Teresa, N.Mex. Plans to increase the capacity for handling information necessary to document the increasing number of border crossings have not been made, largely because the majority of the information handling resides in the commercial sector.
A significant fraction of commercial trucks currently arrive at ports of entry with either incorrect or incomplete documentation. These trucks are summarily pulled over to a primary inspection area, and sometimes subsequently to a secondary inspection area, where they are often completely unloaded. Primary and secondary inspections take a minimum of 15 minutes and can last several hours or even days if problems are found. Delays typically cost both the transport provider and the manufacturer. Truck and driver costs can exceed $100/hour. Maquila plants are increasingly operated in just-in-time mode, so receival delays at the maquilas can result in work stoppage, idling dozens of workers and halting production lines costing thousands of dollars per minute to run. Paper documents currently carry the information needed to cross the border. Truck drivers carry the documents and present them to inspectors at the ports of entry and exit. Many factors can cause delays at the port, including drug interdiction campaigns and fugitive alerts. Proper documentation does not always prevent delays, but improper documentation is virtually certain to cause them.
The root causes of documentation errors are deeply buried in the complex preparations that precede a border crossing. The required regulatory documents for each leg of the trip are numerous and bilingual. Additional NAFTA requirements have further complicated the documentation while increasing the cross-border traffic, leading to the expansion of the import/export brokerage industry in both the US and Mexico. For example, a typical package prepared by a Mexican broker includes the original invoice; the Shipper""s Export Declaration; a Spanish language invoice called the factura; an import pedimento (Mexican import/export declaration document); an English manifest and a Spanish manifesto describing the physical nature of the shipment for the trucking firms; a packing list, describing how the shipment is actually arranged on the truck; and any of several possible Mexican regulatory compliance documents. NAFTA documents must be on file certifying the firm as a maquila, and the pedimento must be registered by the firm in some manner to satisfy year-end material-balancing regulations. The driver and the vehicle must be properly licensed and certified. Further complications stem from the maquilas"" ability to consolidate several invoices and facturas under a single pedimento. Shipment into the U.S. involves several additional U.S. import documents. The documents are syntactically distinct, although there is significant semantic overlap. For example, the xe2x80x9ctotal shipment valuexe2x80x9d given on many of these documents is not necessarily called the same thing between any given pair of documents nor will the value necessarily be computed on the same basis. For example, valuations are in two different currencies.
Customshouse brokers assist manufacturers with preparing the documents for a given shipment and generally pay any duty assessed. Brokers also provide additional assurance to their clients by remaining up to date on the latest regulations regarding trade between the U.S. and Mexico. They are essentially brokers of specialized knowledge and information, operating between government regulators and the commercial world. Brokers prepare regulatory forms from an initial manifest that may be presented by a client in a variety of forms, including presentation in person, fax machine, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and most recently Internet email. Although segments of the process are computerized, transcription of information from paper to computer and back occurs often even in advanced brokerage houses. Fortunately both the U.S. and Mexican customs services have (separate) computerized entry systems that accept document filings by modem. Nonetheless, errors occur with great regularity and brokers maintain troubleshooters on site at the ports of entry to handle such incidents.
A successful border crossing is the result of a coordinated effort on the part of the manufacturer, the consignee, and carriers and brokers on both sides of the border. FIGS. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 illustrate some of the interactions and relationships among the various stakeholders. For example, a nominal southbound (U.S. to Mexico) maquila shipment involves the owner of the goods (xe2x80x9cthe firmxe2x80x9d), the firm""s U.S. shipping facility, at least one U.S. trucking company (perhaps owned by the firm), U.S. customs, a U.S. export broker (sometimes an employee of the firm), Mexican customs, a Mexican import broker (also sometimes an employee of the firm), a Mexican trucking company, and finally the maquila plant itself.
Although new port facilities are planned and expansion of old ports has begun, traffic at the border is often backed up several miles. Often the customs district maintains several alternative ports in the same area. However, drivers cannot effectively choose an alternative port prior to enqueing for two reasons: (1) the intended port of entry is declared on the paper document the driver carries and cannot be changed without resubmission to the US Customs Automated Cargo System; and (2) the driver cannot determine the traffic load (nor, therefore, estimate the delay) at the port until arrival.
Border-crossing stakeholders have noted that a frequent cause of legitimate freight being pulled over for inspection is improper or incomplete documentation. In a recent border process survey, 78% of U.S. and Mexican firms doing business across the border cited automated documentation as a priority technology, the highest percentage for any technology in the survey. See Parker and Icerman, xe2x80x9cStakeholder Identification of Advanced Technology Opportunities at International Ports of Entryxe2x80x9d, Sandia National Laboratories Technical Report (1996). Stakeholders were concerned, however, that a highly-accessible electronic documentation scheme might make their proprietary information vulnerable. Commercial stakeholders were adamant that the system be decentralized; they considered a central database administered by a national government highly undesirable. The second-most frequently cited technology, container/conveyance tracking, was cited by 60%. In all, technologies that the stakeholders identified as high-priority appear to address the root causes of their delays: correct, complete, and timely electronic documentation;
computer-based sharing of shipment information among stakeholders; protection of proprietary information; and timely shipment status information.
Simulations of the new Santa Teresa port of entry show that computerized documentation and tracking technology would cut time spent waiting to cross the border by 33% (from 18 to 12 minutes) at 30% technology penetration and four times the traffic in 1995-96, and by 52% (from 47 to 20 minutes) at 60% penetration and six times the traffic in 1995-96 (saturation level). These reduced waiting times would be enjoyed by all vehicles, not just those with advanced technology. If a dedicated lane for advanced technology vehicles were added in the latter case, those vehicles would enjoy a reduction in waiting time of 75%.
Consequently, there is a need for method and apparatus that make use of existing computer and communication resources and that reduce the errors and delays common to complex transactions such as international shipping.
The present invention provides a method and apparatus that make use of existing computer and communication resources and that reduce the errors and delays common to complex transactions such as international shipping.
The present invention comprises an agent-based collaborative work environment that assists geographically distributed commercial and government users in the management of complex transactions such as the transshipment of goods across the U.S.-Mexico border. Software agents can mediate the creation, validation and secure sharing of shipment information and regulatory documentation over the Internet, using the World-Wide Web to interface with human users. Agents can be organized into Agencies. Each agency can represent a commercial or government agency. Agents can perform four specific functions on behalf of their user organizations: (1) agents with domain knowledge can elicit commercial and regulatory information from human specialists through forms presented via web browsers; (2) agents can mediate information from forms with diverse ontologies, copying invariant data from one form to another thereby eliminating the need for duplicate data entry; (3) cohorts of distributed agents can coordinate the work flow among the various information providers and they can monitor overall progress of the documentation and the location of the shipment to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met prior to arrival at the border; (4) agents can provide status information to human users and can attempt to influence them when problems are predicted.
The present invention comprises a number of innovations, including a distributed object substrate that supports authenticated transactions among agents, a general-purpose agent development framework, agent integration with the World-Wide Web, and a collaborative agent architecture that supports open trading over the Internet.
Advantages and novel features will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon examination of the following description or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and attained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.